[36] Genesis vi. 1-6.
MAP SHOWING THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE SITE OF EDEN AS DESCRIBED IN GENESIS
In one point only have we reason to doubt whether this old history fairly represents the palanthropic age. It notes the invention of musical instruments, the use of metals, the domestication of animals as already existing in the antediluvian period. Of these we have little or no archæological evidence. The only musical instrument of this period known is a whistle made of one of the bones of a deer's foot, and capable of sounding a tetrachord or four notes, and we have no certain evidence of metals or domesticated animals. We must bear in mind that there may have been more civilised races than those of the Cro-magnon type, and that the latter evince an artistic skill which if it had any scope for development may have led to great results. The native metals must have been known to man from the first, though they must have been rare or only locally common; and many semi-barbarous nations of later times show us that it is only a short step from the knowledge of native metals to the art of metallurgy, in so far as it consists in treating those ores that in weight and metallic lustre most resemble the metals themselves. It is also deserving of notice that no other hypothesis than that of antediluvian civilisation can account for the fact that in the dawn of postdiluvian history we find the dwellers by the Euphrates and the Nile already practising so many of the arts of civilised life. In connection with this we may place the early dawn of literature. Without insisting on the documents which the Chaldean Noah, Hasisadra, is said to have hid at Sippara before the Deluge, we have the known fact that in the earliest dawn of postdiluvian history the art of writing was known in Chaldea and in Egypt. This at once testifies to antediluvian culture, and shows that the means existed to record important events.
There is, perhaps, no one of the vagaries now current under the much abused name of evolution more opposed to facts, whether physical or historical than the notion that, because 3000 years B.C. we have evidence of an advanced civilisation in Chaldea and in Egypt, this must have been preceded by a long and uninterrupted progress through many thousands of years from a savage state. Two facts alone are sufficient to show the folly of such a supposition. First, the intervention of that great physical catastrophe which separates the palanthropic and neanthropic periods; and secondly, the testimony of history in favour of the arts of civilisation originating with great inventors, and not by any slow and gradual process of evolution. According to all history, sacred and profane, many such inventors existed even in the palanthropic and early neanthropic ages, and transmitted their arts in an advanced state to later times. The Book of Genesis testifies to this in its notices of Tubal Cain and Jubal; and the monuments of Chaldea and Egypt show that metallurgy, sculpture, and architecture were as far advanced at the very dawn of history as in any later period. It is true that Genesis represents its early inventors as mere men, albeit 'sons of God,' while they often appear as gods or demi-gods in the early history of the heathen nations; but the fact remains that then, as now, the rare appearance of God-given inventive genius is the sole cause of the greater advances in art and civilisation. Spontaneous development may produce socialistic trades' unions or Chinese stagnation, but great gifts, whether of prophecy, of song, of scientific insight, or of inventive power, are the inspiration of the Almighty.
We have in the closing part of the Bible story of the antediluvian age even an intimation of the deterioration of climate and means of subsistence towards the end of the period. Lamech, we are told, named his son Noah—rest or comfort—in the hope that by his means he should be comforted, because of the ground which the Lord had cursed. That curse provoked by the sons of man he may have recognised as fulfilled in the gradual deterioration of the climate toward the close of the palanthropic age. There are here surely some curious coincidences which might be followed farther, did space permit.
We now come to the close of the whole in the Deluge; and as this has been made in our own time the subject of much discussion, and as it contains within itself the whole kernel of the subject, it merits a separate treatment.